


Of Ghosts and Hauntings

by stellarel



Series: Thirteen fanzine prompt week stuff [3]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:22:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24509848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellarel/pseuds/stellarel
Summary: The Doctor gets a distress signal.The fam investigates.There may or may not be ghosts involved.Written for the Thirteen fanzine prompt week! Today's prompt was 'Haunted'.
Series: Thirteen fanzine prompt week stuff [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1800295
Kudos: 15





	Of Ghosts and Hauntings

It was supposed to be a quiet night in the TARDIS. 

_Supposed_ to be.

Then, as usual, things didn't go as planned.

Leaning to the console in the hazy, golden lights of the room, the Doctor studies her psychic paper with a concerned crease between her eyebrows. 

"What is it?" Yaz asks, peering over the Timelord's shoulder. 

The Doctor turns the paper slightly, to show the message better. "A distress signal."

 _Make the ghosts go away_ , the paper reads, in haphazard scribbles that's closer to crow's feet than handwriting.

Graham, who had just sat down with a cup of tea, looks up at them. The tired disappointment was evident in his eyes; he had been looking forward to a quiet night with nothing to do and nowhere to be. He didn't say anything, and of course he would help anyone who needed helping, but that didn't mean he wasn't slightly sad to see his plans slipping through his fingers.

Yaz furrows her brows. "How'd it get there? I thought that thing was like...a magic ID card or something."

The Doctor gives her half a shrug and turns to examine the paper again, now digging around her pockets in hopes of fishing out the sonic screwdriver and tracing the origins of the message. "It is, when it needs to be. Sometimes it can also pick up strong enough psychological distress." She explains, her mind already halfway somewhere else.

"Looks like a child's handwriting." Yaz points out.

The Doctor turns to examine the writing again. "Must have been sent by a child, then." She then says, tilting her head a little, the worry on her face becoming more imminent.

If there was one thing the Doctor didn't like, it was children being in psychological distress.

The Doctor gives the paper a quick scan, and turns towards the console, her fingers already running over the controls. "It's coming from Earth." She says, to no-one in particular, already punching in the coordinates.

Ryan comes to check out the message, too. "That's one weird distress signal." He points out. "Ghosts?" He adds, with a raised eyebrow and his voice clouded with disbelief.

The Doctor shrugs a little. "I've never met a real ghost. Would love to talk to one." She says, tone light, without looking up from the controls.

Yaz and Ryan turn to look at each other with equally confused expressions.

Graham sighs quietly and puts down his teacup, midway from raising it to his lips. "Hold on, Doc. Ghosts aren't real, are they?" He squints his eyes a little. "We'd know that by now, right? We'd have found some kind of scientific evidence?"

The Doctor pulls a lever before turning to look at him, leaning to the console. "There's a lot of things living on your planet that you don't know about, Graham." She says, matter-of-factly. 

"Right, like all those creepy buggers at the bottom of the ocean." Ryan points out. "I don't even want to know what's down there. It's too weird, man."

The Doctor nods. "Right. Those, too."

Yaz turns to look at her, with her eyes furrowed slightly. " _Too_?"

The Doctor turns back towards the console, and doesn't elaborate despite the curious looks all three humans were giving her.

When met with no further explanation, the humans in question just share a look and shrug it off as just one of those weird things that had now become a part of their daily lives.

"Right. I guess we're going ghost hunting, then?" Yaz asks, sounding a little unsure of the whole sentence.

Ryan starts to tap out the Ghostbusters theme against the metal countertop of the console, mouthing along a quiet _"who you gonna call?_ "

Graham shoots him a look.

Soon, the TARDIS materializes near an old house that looked like it was caught somewhere between trying to be a mansion and a Victorian townhouse at the same time. 

"Looks haunted enough." Ryan says, looking over the building.

"You don't really believe it's ghosts, do you?" Yaz asks, looking up at the Doctor. 

"Dunno." She says, voice surprisingly casual, and starts walking towards the door. "Might be. Probably not, but you never know."

After all, there have always been things just a little outside of the human range of perception. Even outside the Timelord range of perception. 

Dogs hear sounds we can't hear, some animals can see heat signatures, and the mantis ray is able to see a whole spectrum of colors we couldn’t even imagine.

What humans think of as reality is actually just a human-sized slice of it. It's what we sense, and what we know, but it's only a small portion of what’s actually there.

Who's to say there aren't beings who inhabit the space just a little bit to the left of what we can see?

The Doctor didn't pretend to know everything there was to know about the universe and the beings that did or did not exist within it, or outside of it. Sure, she knew a lot, and had probably met most of these beings at one point or the other, but she was by no means an authority on the subject. There were weird enough things that existed - maybe ghosts did, too, and she had just never crossed paths with them before.

There were a lot of stories about ghosts, after all. Those stories had to come from somewhere.

Knocking on the door, the Doctor rocks back and forth on her feet, looking over the absurdly massive on windows either side of the door. The house was full of beautiful, intricate, and completely unnecessary details, some of the windows were speckled with tinted, colorful glass, and really, the house did look like it was a textbook haunted house.

A young woman opens the door. There's a child hiding partially behind her, looking at the Doctor and the rest of the crew with wide, worried eyes.

Judging by the height of the child, the Doctor is pretty sure this child is somewhere between the learning to write -phase and the starting to rebel against their parents -phase.

"Who the hell are you?" The woman asks, impatience clear in her voice. 

The Doctor flashes her psychic paper. "Ghostbusters inc. Do you happen to have a ghost infestation we might be able to help with?"

The woman stares at the Doctor, and her face looks like it doesn't quite know which expression to settle on. Surprise? Disbelief? Annoyance? Relief? Exhaustion? They were all present in her features, and this more or less answered the Doctor's question.

The child leans out of the woman's shadow a little, to look up at the Doctor. 

The Doctor turns towards the smaller human when the woman stays quiet for just a little longer than the Doctor's attention spam was able to handle. "Did you send out a distress signal?" She asks, and the child blinks at her a few times.

"Are you here to help?"

The Doctor smiles at this. _Result_.

"Yes. We're here to help." She glances at the woman again, to see if she had recovered from her initial shock yet. "I'm the Doctor, and these are my mates, Ryan, Graham and Yaz." She makes a vague hand gesture towards each of them.

"Now. What can you tell me about these ghosts of yours?" She asks, looking at the woman, but secretly directing the question more towards the child. 

Children were often better at this than the adults were - more open, more honest. Less judgemental towards the strange and unusual.

"Our house is haunted." The child answers, and the woman purses her lips together. 

"I wouldn't say haunted. But there has been something....weird going on, lately." She finally says.

"What kind of weird? Yaz asks, kicking her police officer personality into gear. 

The woman seemed to be slightly more comfortable talking to Yaz, who was giving off a remarkably calm and exceedingly human sort of energy, than the Doctor, who was, well, not.

The woman slowly launches into explanation of voices that seemed to come out of nowhere, weird feelings of being watched when you were alone, feeling like there was somebody else in the room with you when you couldn't see anybody there. Yaz listened to her, nodding along, and making mental notes of the whole thing, for future reference.

Meanwhile, the Doctor busied herself by looking around and scanning the house. The child comes to stand next to her, head tilted and eyes curious. 

"What's that?" 

The Doctor turns to look at the child, and then she smiles. "This?" She flips the sonic screwdriver around in the air once. "It's my ghost detector." She explains, with the same voice she reserved for any technical explanation for how things worked.

The child looks at the screwdriver for a moment, and nods. "Okay." Then, after a quiet moment, adds: “Is it telling you there’s ghosts here?”

“Not as of yet, no. No ghosts so far.”

The Doctor leaves her scan to run in the background, and then she tilts her head slightly, looking at the child and trying her best to keep the worry from showing on her face. "Have you seen the ghosts?"

"No." The child says quietly. "But I know they're there."

"If you haven't seen them, how do you know they're ghosts?" 

The child looks down. "I have nightmares about them."

The Doctor thinks this over for about a second and a half. "Well, it's a good thing we're here now, then. Do you know why?"

"Why?"

She takes a moment to make sure she meets the child’s gaze. "Because I'm your nightmare's worst nightmare." The Doctor then says, her voice serious. 

The child looks at her silently for a moment, as if pondering whether or not to trust this.

Then, eventually, the child nods a little, and some of the worry seems to lift off of those small shoulders.

The Doctor nods, and turns her attention back towards the sonic screwdriver, which seemed to have come to some sort of a conclusion on her earlier scan. She furrows her brows at the readings a little, and then looks around the room.

"Are we near any old mines, by any chance?" She asks, and the woman turns to look at her, confused. 

"Yes, why?"

"Ah." The Doctor nods, and her expression melts from worry to warm relief. Then, she offers the sonic screwdriver towards the child. "I believe I’ve found your ghosts." 

The child looks at the screwdriver without really understanding much, and the Doctor smiles a little. "Not really ghosts, though, I'm afraid. Shame - would've really wanted to meet one. Oh well, maybe next time." She rambles with a one-shouldered shrug.

"Doc, what are you talking about?" Graham asks, "If it's not ghosts, what is it? It's not-" He starts, but then he cuts himself off, realizing it might not be the best idea to introduce the possibility of aliens into the discussion.

"It's electromagnetic radiation, interfering with the sensory receptors of your brain." She explains. "Metal deposits down at the mines and the electric grid of this house, basically creating a hotspot of electromagnetic fields. It's nothing dangerous, but it can definitely make you feel like you're being haunted." 

The woman squints her eyes a little, but as the explanation sinks in, her shoulders seem to relax a bit. 

The Doctor wasn't sure if she was disappointed or relieved that it hadn't been real ghosts.

But then again, maybe this was as real as any ghost.

Because really, when you think about it, the definition is vague at best. What is a ghost, if not an impression of what we think is there? Something we feel but can't see? 


End file.
